Introduction and Comments on the Text

The Travel Notebook of M. and Mme. Télesphore Demers

[copyright 2017: Dennis M. Doiron]

By the late spring of 1908, Télesphore Demers had lived in the United States for nearly eighteen years. On arriving at the Sanford-Springvale train station in 1890 with his wife, Henriette, and all nine of their surviving children, he had been a farmer for over thirty years in the small villages of Saint-Julien and Saint-Fortunat, Québec, first on his father’s farm, then on his own. But gaining a livelihood on a Canadian farm in the foothills of the far northern Appalachian Mountains was no easy thing, so Télesphore, like hundreds of thousands of other French-Canadians of the time, sought a better life in one of the expanding mill towns of New England.

Henriette and Télesphore Demers, circa 1908.

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       Theirs was one of the first French-Canadian families to arrive in Sanford. Télesphore quickly became a leader of the French-speaking community, as he had been in Saint-Fortunat, where at 24 years old, he had been elected its first mayor, then was elected to the school board, and for much of the 1880s was a justice of the peace. In Sanford, he does not appear to have been active in municipal affairs, but he was a leader in the church and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Association. Notably, he was active in the successful effort to persuade the Bishop of the Diocese of Portland to establish Saint Ignatius Parish and in the request for a grant of land for a Catholic cemetery from the Goodall family, the owner of the Goodall textile mills. And for many years he actively encouraged fellow French-Canadians to become American citizens.

      The Demers family first rented a home or an apartment in Springvale, a part of the municipality of Sanford, before moving to the section of town then known as Sanford Village, Their house was located near the textile mills on Allen Street, now Pioneer Avenue. The house was purchased for $950 and was entirely paid for by 1896. Télesphore worked first as a carpenter for the Goodall Mills at a time when those mills were undergoing a substantial expansion. Later, he constructed homes in Sanford, and vacation homes and hotels in the nearby seacoast area, which was also seeing tremendous growth.

Telesphore was a large, broad-shouldered and muscular man, about six feet tall. According to his grandson Edmund Demers, he had a gruff, loud but not unpleasant voice and spoke French with a heavy Québec accent, which he used to tell the same stories over and over again, his voice rising and falling to fit the needs of the story being told.

    Unlike his father and, presumably, most if not all of his ancestors, Télesphore was literate, although he was educated at a country school for only four years before he was thirteen. Because of that education, he was able to write his travel notes, which were later put in final form by his daughter Odelie. We do not have a copy of his original notes, but in in the only known extant writing in his own hand, his limited education is revealed by the phonetic spelling of many words and by a crude penmanship. One can easily imagine Odelie and Télesphore discussing and working together over his notes while she wrote out the final journal in her careful, clear penmanship.

Although Télesphore would live for almost 60 years in Maine, he never learned to speak English, even though some of the people he supervised as a carpenter spoke only in that language. Edmund Demers told me that when he was around 10 years old, his father, Odias (known as Pete), had taken him and pépère Télesphore to an agricultural show in neighboring Alfred, Maine. When they were looking at one of the exhibits, an English-speaking man recognized Télesphore and came to him and said with a smile while shaking his hand, “marteau, marteau” (“hammer, hammer”).  It was his way of saying that he had formerly worked for Télesphore from whom he had learned some work-related words in French.

      When the summer of 1908 was approaching, Télesphore must have felt the time was right to visit the home country. Their youngest child, Odias, was fourteen and could be left in the care of other family members, and they had the financial resources to be be gone for months at a time. So he and Henriette planned a long promenade au Canada to visit family members, including his oldest son and namesake who had settled in the far north of Québec near Lac Saint-Jean, and to attend the Tricentennial Celebration of the founding of Québec. During the trip, he would faithfully write daily notes of his travels about the people he met and the things he did, a journal similar to the one his daughter Odelie had written on her trip to Canada in 1898. But not surprisingly, a journal kept by a 60 year-old husband, father and grand-father would differ from one written by a 26 year-old unmarried woman
Odelie´s notes reflect her immediate experiences during the trip, especially her social calls and the soirées she attended with her sister. (One senses that a purpose of the trip, especially her meetings with her cousin Fortunat, may have been to search out a husband). Her notes, therefore, are primarily oriented to the present, the “now” of her trip, while Telesphore´s notes describe not only his trip through Québec but a trip through time into the past. A trip during which he not only records visiting the key places and events of his own life, but those of his and Henriette's parents and other ancestors. And because of  Quebec's Tricentennial, he even takes in a broader, deeper trip into Quebec's past.  

Whether he intended it or not at the beginning of the trip, his promenade, therefore, was in large part a trip of remembrance by a member of the large Demers family of Canada whose presence there dates from 1643 or 1644. His trip into the past begins before he arrives in Saint-Fortunat, when he visits Saint-Nicolas on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River near Québec City, the village where his father and all his Demers ancestors after 1666 were born, and to the neighboring villages of Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly, Saint-Gilles, and Saint-Agapit where he was born and raised until he was 12 years old.

One of the more moving passages in the journal shows how the promenade was turning into a journey of remembrance. While staying in Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly, he visits the farm of an uncle whom he had never met, Desiré Lamontagne, a half-brother of his mother. The farm at that time had been occupied by the Lamontagne family for two hundred years (and continues to be in the family to this day), and Uncle Desiré was in the process of completely renovating the old farmhouse. Telesphore immediately decides to help out for several days. One evening when he is staying overnight at the farm, he writes:

At eight o’clock in the morning, I went to my Uncle Désiré Lamontagne’s house to work with others on the renovation of the old house where my dear old mother was born. It was a joy for me to have the honor of putting my hands to this work. It is the second time that it has been renovated completely. We’ve had a beautiful day. This afternoon was very sunny. We spent the evening talking of current fashions and of the old days. At ten o’clock, we went to bed, happy to think that this dwelling today is the ancient farmhouse that sheltered my mother on the day she was born and for several years after. It was far from my thoughts that when I left Sanford for my trip that this pleasure or, rather, this honor, would have been reserved for me.  

When Edmund Demers was a child, Télesphore told him several times about the experience of repairing his mother's house in Saint-Nicolas, and presumably told the same story to many others over the years. It obviously was a meaningful event for him.

Télesphore's journal, however, was not only about the past. It would also record social calls, his continuing interest in farming and his interest in other economic activity, like the booming mining operations in the Thetford Mines region, the factories and canals in Berlin, N.H., and Lewiston, Maine, the growth of Sherbrooke, Quebec, and the colonisation of the Saguenay-Lac Saint-Jean area north of Québec City and that of the Saint-Eleuthère region south of Rivière du Loup, Québec.

Perhaps because of his greater life experiences and his longer trip, as well as a more informal manner of expressing himself, Télesphore’s journal contains a greater vocabulary and more expressions than that of Odelie´s, especially the words and expressions of French Canada. For those interested, like me, in Canadian French, his journal provides many interesting linguistic passages.

After reading and rereading Télesphore’s notes, I cannot help but wonder about his motivation in keeping such a detailed, daily journal, especially since writing it could not have been easy for him given his limited education. I know very few people even today with their better education and the relative ease of writing with electronic technology who would be willing or have the discipline to keep a similar journal.

One imagines that he was inspired by Odelie’s travel notes of her trip in 1898, and that he wrote his notes so that he could relive the trip and share its experiences with his children. But he provides so much information about his past and the history of his ancestors, that you cannot help but wonder if he also meant it to be read by grand-children, great-grandchildren and further generations so that they would not forget their French-Canadian heritage, including its language. Whether or not that is what he intended, that has been its effect on me, and I hope it will have the same effect on others who read his journal.

As with Odelie’s Livre de Notes de Voyage, I wish you a bonne promenade au Québec, this time with Télesphore as your guide.

Comments on the English Translation

      Before translating Télesphore’s travel notes from the original handwritten French to English, they were transcribed and edited in French. The handwritten notes contain very few capital letters, accent marks, or punctuation, including periods at the end of sentences. Where missing, these were added to the edited French transcript. For the most part, the notes were written in continuous lines with few paragraphs or headings. These were also added as necessary to the typed transcript, as were page numbers in brackets in the center of the text to refer to the pages of the manuscript; the pages in the manuscript were unnumbered.

The manuscript contains a number of spelling and grammatical errors, especially relating to the proper “agreement” among verbs, adjectives, nouns, and pronouns that are so important in the French language. All these were corrected in the French transcript.

There are few editorial comments in the translated text. Where used, they are contained in brackets. To give a reminder of the original language used, accent marks are retained in the names of people and places and a few French words, especially honorifics like Monsieur and Madame, have been kept in the translation.

Finally, the original handwritten notes, of course, do not contain photographs or other illustrations. These have been added with captions to both the edited French journal and to the English translation.

Dennis M. Doiron

Gardiner, Maine, November 2017

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Introduction To Edmund Demers´ 1990 Translation of The Travel Notebook of Telesphore Demers

This 18,000 word manuscript, now in the possession of my cousin, Oline Doiron of Sanford, Maine, was written by our grandfather, Télesphore Demers, to record the events, of his “promenade” to Canada in 1908.

      Telesphore Demers, 1847-1950, was born in St Agapit, P.Q. His father, Damase Demers, was born in St Nicolas, P.Q., ancient seat of the Demers Family. In 1838 Damase married Euphrosine Baquet dit Lamontagne. In 1869 Telesphore married his third cousin, Henriette Helene Lamontagne. This close tie with the Lamontagne family is reflected in the many references to Lamontagne in the journal.     

      Telesphore was a farmer in St Fortunat, Wolfe County, P.Q. Though possessing a bare minimum of education - four years of tutoring by the parish priest - he was a leader in his rural community. A brief vita is appended to the journal.

      He left for the United States with his family of nine children in 1890; three girls had died in infancy and a boy would be born a few years after their arrival in Sanford, Maine. His cousin, Honore, had preceded him there, but he turns up later in the journal, having returned to Canada to settle in St Samuel.

      Carpentry would be Télesphore’s stateside occupation. The hotels and cottages being constructed at York County, Maine, beach resorts as a result of the growing electric railway network, kept him busy for several years. From the lost wages he refers to as a consequence of his four month trip, we deduce his wages to have been not quite fifty dollars a month.

      Seen in this light, the $175 expenditure for the trip and its long duration underlined its importance in my grandfather’s life. He now owned his home in Sanford, the children were married or gainfully employed, Québec was celebrating its tricentennial - it was the right time for a “grande promenade” and pilgrimage; one worth writing about.

      The journal runs to 120 closely packed pages in a blue lined notebook neatly written out by his oldest daughter, Odelie Demers Dubois, who had been a school teacher in Canada. This explains the high standard of spelling and grammar in the journal. Whether any further editing occurred, it is impossible to say.

      Prominent in the journal are the unfailing morning and evening weather reports and the logging of arrivals and departures tied to his dependable Waltham gold watch. Ranging from Berlin, N.H., north to Lake St. John, P.Q., east to Riviere du Loup, and further to Bath, Maine, it is not surprising that Telesphore and Henriette logged 1,843 miles from June 4 to October 15, 1898.

One wishes for more descriptive detail; nevertheless, the journal informs us of what must have been the experience of hundreds if not thousands of turn-of-the century Franco-Americans when they embarked on the “grande promenade au Canada.”